Mobile First Case Study

My Home Move drive conversion with mobile first website

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Background

My Home Move is a multi-award winning market leading brand that you may well never have heard of. Whilst online estate agents grab all the headlines, My Home Move quietly helps tens of thousands of people every year to move home by providing them with mover conveyancing services.

In 2015 alone, My Home Move completed nearly 50,000 mover transactions and that number is expected to grow to more than 100,000 by 2017. By providing industry leading conveyancing services alongside award winning technology the company is going places and utilising digital channels for marketing is central to their journey.

In fact, new customers that are converted from the website is growing faster than any other channel. But that didn’t stop, Neal Preece, Consumer Online Director who joined the organisation in June 2015 from targeting bigger improvements.

“There was so much opportunity to attract and target consumers and so many key learnings that could be brought across from other sectors like retail where the online audience was more mature. The key to achieving that was a mobile first strategy with user experience at its heart.”

The main function of the website on any platform is to convert visitors via an online form that provides an instant quote. My Home Move isn’t immune to the growth in mobile traffic to the website and analytics revealed that traffic was increasing significantly on smartphone and tablet platforms. The existing website didn’t perform well on mobile and so a high priority was to rectify that situation.

Even though the form was relatively simple, Neal believed it could be improved for all platforms and that this would lead to an increase in conversion. As PPC is the main source of traffic conversion improvements have a direct impact on marketing spend so there was a dual opportunity.

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Brief

The objectives for the project were:

Deliver a website that performed well on all platforms and in particular on mobile

Ensure the forms were optimised for conversion on every platform

Deliver an enhanced customer experience that would encourage greater engagement and conversion

UX 24/7 was commissioned to carry out user research to establish how potential customers searched for and identified online conveyancing lawyers and to identify usability issues with the journey to and experience with the existing site.

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Methodology

We carried out usability testing and 10 participants were recruited representing home movers who were buying, selling or buying and selling. Over the course of two days they were interviewed and asked to interact with the website on smartphone, tablet and PC.

The output from the research was a detailed evaluation of user needs combined with a range of recommendations that would form the basis for the website redesign scope of work.

Neal appointed Intermarketing, a design and branding agency to lead the design and build and to work alongside UX24/7 who operated as an independent user research. Neal explains why the need for two agencies: “Independence is important as I don’t want the design team marking their own homework. In my experience the final design is always better when the design team works closely with an agency like UX24/7 as they get both the expertise in UX but also an independent perspective”.

With the design and build agency engaged, work began in the development of the new website in February 2016. By March 2016 wireframes were ready for usability testing and to avoid a London bias, the initial sessions were schedule in Leeds, which also provided easy travel for the whole team.

The wireframes were relatively low fidelity and functionality so UX24/7 designed a test protocol and deliverables to maximise budget and time. Just one day of usability testing was arranged with the 6 participants recruited as users of both smartphone and desktop PC. This meant that each platform was tested 6 times and 3 times tested first.

Part of the approach used was to ensure that the design team was present in the viewing room so that decisions could be made there and then about how to take the prototype forward. That meant UX24/7 could keep the project momentum and supply a just a high level report which was delivered close of play the day after testing together with the full session videos for reference.

The next stage of the project was to develop fully functional HTML prototypes which Intermarketing delivered very quickly. Just 6 weeks after the first round of usability testing the more developed prototype was being put through its paces. This time the usability testing sessions were scheduled to take place in London to help understand if there were any noticeable differences in behaviour due to geography.

With greater fidelity on both smartphone and desktop platforms longer sessions were required to enable participants to interact with all the functionality of the prototypes. Ten participants were recruited to meet the target profile of potential customers, with five asked to use smartphone and five using desktop PC. With longer sessions, more features and functionality, new branding and look and feel there was far more insight gathered and so for this round of user research Neal asked for a far more detailed report.

QUICK FACTS

Overall conversion increased by over 80%

Mobile 1st Strategy.

Usability Testing at every stage.

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Results

Following the implementation of the recommendations form the final round of usability testing the new My Home Move website went live in August, just six months after the redesign project began.

It was immediately obvious that the website was outperform the previous version and by the end of the first full month of operation there were some significant wins. Overall conversion had increased from 20 to 30% but the real success was in mobile. Neal explains more.

“Our mobile first strategy really paid off when the mobile conversion rate increased by over 80% on smartphone and tablets. Even though the main conversion tool was a relatively simple form, by redesigning it as part of the build, and involving users at every step of the journey we have seen huge improvements”.

Finally, and an added bonus is that the user centred redesign has resulted in an increased quality score as a result of the better landing page experience. This has delivered a more than 40% reduction in cost per lead and lowered the overall CPC spend.

“UX24/7’s willingness to be flexible and to scope the usability testing to be exactly what we needed both in terms of budget and timings was really unique”